Kyros accompanied his husband on a work trip to England, Sweden, Switzerland, and India over the course of two weeks. He and Monica thought it would be a good opportunity to blog about traveling with an Invisible Illness. For those of you who don’t already know, Kyros particular Invisible Illnesses are peripheral neuropathy in both feet, a torn meniscus in my left knee that has refused to heal correctly, and somewhere in-between severe lactose-intolerance and a medium dairy allergy. So this is his story...

If you missed previous installments of this series, go here to catch up before reading this.

Day 6 - 1/26/18 - Uppsala / Stockholm

I slept poorly again last night. My knee was hurt so bad from all the walking and stairs yesterday that I couldn’t find a comfortable position to fall asleep. No matter how I adjusted things, within a few minutes, my knee would begin to throb and it would wake me up. I tossed and turned all night. I’d guess I got about three hours of broken sleep over the course of eight hours.

After breakfast in the hotel with my husband, with the help of the hotel concierge, I made an appointment for a massage at a nearby hotel. To kill time until my massage, I decided that pain or no, I wanted to see a museum here in the city that had a lot of Viking things. So I walked (I know, I should have taken a cab, but I’m stubborn like that) to the Museum Gustavianum and spent an hour looking around before heading to the other hotel for my massage. The massage was great and really helped with the accumulated body aches from all the traveling and strange beds. Sadly, it didn’t do as much for my poor tired feet or knee. But I found out that getting the massage entitled me to use the rest of their spa facilities. I spent the next couple of hours going back and forth between the jacuzzi and the sauna. By the time I left, my feet and knee felt better, but still not 100%. Yay for small victories, right?

After my spa day, I went back to our hotel, collected my luggage, and waited for my husband to get done with work so we could catch the train down to Stockholm where we are staying tonight.

The train stations here in Sweden are mini-cities. They remind me of Grand Central Station in New York City. They have a main concourse with dozens of stores, then long halls branching off in every direction with even more restaurants, stores, and businesses lining both sides of the hallway. And it feels like they go on forever. After we exited the train, we walked for what felt like fifteen minutes to get outside. Thankfully, the hotel was directly across the street at that point. We dropped off our bags and then took a local train one stop to find dinner. The place we intended to go flatly informed us at the door that they were “full up”. The server didn’t really have any suggestions for us except that there was another place, “just down the road.” It wasn’t that far, but since my feet had swollen and started to hurt on the train ride from Uppsala to Stockholm, I just wanted to get somewhere and sit down.

Once dinner was over, we took the train back to the Central Station. Rather than walk back through the tunnels where it was hard to judge distance, we stayed above ground on the street. Turns out we had walked the equivalent of five city blocks while underground. By the time we got to our room, I was limping. Every step was agony. I have to give kudos to my husband though. He takes great care of me when we travel. He suggested we stop at the Lush franchise in the train station. He bought some of their Pink Peppermint Foot Cream so he could give me a foot massage once we got to our hotel room. The pain was so intense that I was jerking and jumping from the intense pain with even the slightest touch. Tomorrow we plan on going to the ABBA museum before heading back to London for one night. Then we start our literally day-long trip to India.